Nei Lingding Island

In May 1513, the PortugueseexplorerJorge Álvares arrived at an island near the coast of China they called “Tamão“.^[4] This was the first contact of Europeans with China via the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope.^[5] Tamão was fortified by Simão de Andrade and reclaimed by the Chinese during the expulsion of the Portuguese in the 1520s.^[6] Western scholarship, following J. M. Braga, generally contends that this “Tamão” is Nei Lingding, the main island in the mouth of the Pearl River, 6 km off the coast of the mainland. Recent Chinese scholarship finds this identification to be insufficiently proven, however, and suggests a number of other potential islands including the nearby and far larger Lantau Island